Naftali Frankel. The crime had out-
raged the nation.Shin Bet had in cus-
tody a twenty-nine-year-old settler
named Yosef Haim Ben-David, who
was a suspect in the retaliatory murder
of a Palestinian teen-ager named Mo-
hammed Abu Khdeir. Police had found
Abu Khdeir's body in the Jerusalem
Forest; he had been bludgeoned and
burned to death. Ben-David, the owner
of an eyewear shop who lived in a West
Bank settlement called Geva Binyamin,
told the police that he and two friends
were so enraged by the murder of the
three Israelis that on the day of the fu-
neral they wanted to "harass an Arab
or vandalize property or beat somebody
up, nothing specific."
Ben-David and his friends stopped
at a station to fill bottles with gasoline.
As he told his interrogators, "We were
hot and angry, and decided we'd burn
something of the Arabs'." At first, they
looked for an Arab shop to burn. "Then
we talked and decided to take it up a
notch,"he went on. "We said, 'They took
three of ours, let's take one of theirs.'
And we decided to pick someone up,
to kidnap him, beat him up, and throw
him out."
The friends drove to the neighbor-
hood of Shuafat. It was after 3 A.M., but
it was Ramadan, and many Arabs were
out on the streets well before the morn-
ing meal. Ben-David and the others
spotted a skinny sixteen-year-old boy
along a main road: Abu Khdeir. He was
studying at a vocational school to be an
electrician.Two of the Israelis got out of
the car and asked for directions to Tel
Aviv. Abu Khdeir did not speak He-
brew well; they closed in on the boy,
and shoved him in. One of the Israelis
started to choke him. Ben-David yelled,
"Finish him o !"
"He started to gurgle," Ben-David
told the police. "At some point he stopped
struggling."
They drove to the Jerusalem Forest,
and then Ben-David hit Abu Khdeir
repeatedly in the head with a crowbar.
Finally, the men dragged him out of
the car, and as Ben-David rained blows
on him he shouted, "This is for Eyal,
and this is for Naftali . . ." Then they
poured gasoline over Abu Khdeir and
set him on fire. The postmortem deter-
mined that Abu Khdeir was still alive as
he burned.
The Israelis then drove to a nearby
park. Ben-David confessed that they
began to feel remorse. "I was in shock,"
he told the interrogators. "We're Jews,
we have a heart. Afterward we talked
about it and . . . each one poured his
heart out and we regretted doing it. I
told them . . . 'This is not for us.We erred,
we're compassionate Jews, we're human
beings.' Then we got depressed."
This spirit of rage and resentment is,
as Rivlin observes, no longer confined
to the outer fringe. In the mid-eighties,
Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi
who led both the Jewish Defense
League in the United States and the
Kach Party in Israel, won a seat in the
Knesset. Kahane tra cked in baldly xe-
nophobic rhetoric, but, by 1988, Kach
had been banned by the Knesset as a
racist party and barred from most media
outlets. Today, the mainstream right-
wing party Likud has moved so much
farther to the right that its old "princes,"
such as Benny Begin and Dan Meridor,
who had been opponents of a Palestin-
ian state but advocates of democratic
norms, were voted out of the leadership
in 2012. The Party's dominant young
voices include hard-liners like Danny
Danon, who, as deputy defense min-
ister, disparaged the Gaza operation
as "feeble"; another Likud legislator,
Moshe Feiglin, has called himself a
"proud homophobe" and has vowed to
build a Jewish Temple on the Temple
Mount and "fulfill our purpose in this
land." Netanyahu's principal coalition
partner, Avigdor Lieberman, has de-
manded that Israeli Arabs take loyalty
oaths. Naftali Bennett, the leader of
Jewish Home, a settler-dominated party,
speaks of at least a partial annexation of
the West Bank.
"There's been a sea change in Israel,"
Bennett told me recently, with distinct
satisfaction. "Something dramatic hap-
pened with Gaza. People realize now
that the whole notion of a Palestinian
state, of handing over land to another
Arab entity, won't work. Nine years ago,
we pulled out of Gaza and took out all
the Jews. The result is that Gaza be-
came Hamastan, a fortress of terror. As
much as we wanted to separate, terror
has a way of running after you." Bennett
hopes to succeed Netanyahu as Prime
Minister.
More explicitly jingoistic and racist
elements now operate closer to the cen-
ter of Israeli political life. Some well-
known figures in the religious world
speak openly in an anti-democratic rhet-
oric of Jewish supremacy---"strength
and victimhood all melded together," as
one Israeli friend put it to me. (When a
group of rabbis told their followers not
to rent property to Arabs, Rivlin called
the edict "another nail in the co n
of Israeli democracy.") Yoav Eliasi, a
rapper who calls himself HaTzel (the
Shadow), led a group of fellow-fanatics
who broke up a peace demonstration
in Tel Aviv. One of the groups that ac-
companied the Shadow was Lehava
(Flame), an association of religious
"A man can't fully enjoy golf until he has a family of his own to avoid."